Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

What Happened to Mary? by Bill Pronzini

© 2008 by Bill Pronzini

At the recent Edgar Allan Poe Awards banquet in New York, Bill Pronzini was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, that organization’s most prestigious award. It’s an honor richly deserved, for he is one of the most versatile, insightful, and prolific authors the genre has known — equally accomplished at character study or action scene, historical or contemporary settings. His novel The Other Side of Silence is due out soon.

When you live in a small town and something way out of the ordinary happens, it’s bound to cause a pretty big fuss. Such as a woman everybody knows and some like and some don’t disappearing all of a sudden, without any warning or explanation. Tongues wag and rumors start flying. Folks can’t seem to talk about anything else.

That’s what happened in my town last year. Ridgedale, population 1,400. Hundred-year-old buildings around a central square and bandstand, countryside all pine-covered hills, rolling meadows, and streams full of fat trout. Prettiest little place you’d ever want to see. Of course, I’m biased. I was born and raised and married here, and proud to say I’ve never traveled more than two hundred miles in any direction in the fifty-two years since.

Mary Dawes, the woman who disappeared, wasn’t a native herself. She moved to Ridgedale from someplace upstate after divorcing a deadbeat husband. Just drifted in one day, liked the look of the town, got herself a waitress job at the Blue Moon Cafe and a cabin at the old converted auto court on the edge of town, and settled in. Good-looking woman in her thirties, full of jokes and fun, and none too shy when it came to liquor, men, and good times. She had more than her share of all three in the year or so she lived here, but I’m not one to sit in judgment of anybody’s morals. Fact is, I own Luke’s Tavern, Ridgedale’s one and only watering hole. Inherited it from my father, Luke Gebhardt, Senior, when he died twenty years ago.

Mary liked her fun, like I said, and rumor had it she didn’t much care if the man she had it with was married or single. But she never openly chased married men and she wasn’t all that promiscuous, even if some of the wives called her the town slut behind her back. One relationship at a time and not flagrant about it, if you know what I mean. She came into the tavern one or two nights a week and drank and laughed and played darts and pool with the other regulars, but I never once saw her leave with a man. She made her dates in private. And never gave me or anybody else any trouble.

One of the regulars gave her trouble, though, same as he gave trouble to a lot of other folks at one time or another. Tully Buford, the town bully. Big, ugly, with bad teeth and the disposition of a badger. Lived by himself in a run-down little farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Carpenter and woodworker by trade, picked up jobs often enough to get by because he was good at his work.

Thing about Tully, he was more or less tolerable when he was sober, but when he drank more than a few beers he turned loud-mouthed mean. More than once I had to throw him out when he had a snootful. More than once the county sheriff’s deputies had to arrest him for fighting and creating a public disturbance, too, but he never started any fights or did any damage in my place. If he had, I’d’ve eighty-sixed him permanently. Worse he ever did was devil people and throw his weight around, and as annoying as that was, I couldn’t justify barring him from the premises for it.

Oh hell now, Luke Gebhardt, be honest. You were afraid if you did bar him, he’d come in anyway and start some real serious trouble.

He was capable of it. Town bully wasn’t all he was. Vandal, too, or so most of us believed; Ridgedale had more than its share of that kind of mischief, all of it done on the sly at night so nobody could prove Tully was responsible. Animal abuse was another thing he was guilty of. Doc Dunaway saw him run down a stray dog with his pickup and swore it was deliberate, and there’d been some pet cats, a cow, and a goat shot that was likely his doing.

So it was easier and safer to just stay clear of him whenever possible and try to ignore him when it wasn’t. The only one who felt and acted different was J.B. Hatfield, but I’ll get to him in a minute.

Now and then Tully tried to date Mary Dawes. Like every other woman in Ridgedale, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Just laughed and made some comical remark meant to sting and walked away. One night, though, he prodded her too long and hard and she slapped his face and told him if he didn’t leave her alone, he’d have to go hunting a certain part of his anatomy in Jack Fisher’s cornfield. Everybody had a good laugh over that and Tully went stomping out. That was two days before Mary disappeared.

Disappeared into thin air, seemed like. One day she was there, big as life, and the next she was gone. The last time any of us saw her was when she left the tavern, alone, about eleven-thirty on a warm Thursday night in October.

She hadn’t told anybody she was thinking of leaving Ridgedale, hadn’t given notice at the Blue Moon. On Friday, Harry Duncan, the Blue Moon’s owner, went out to her cabin at the old auto court. Her car was there but she wasn’t. She hadn’t checked out and none of the other residents had seen her leave or knew where she’d gone. That’s when everybody started asking the same question.

What happened to Mary?

The first time I heard foul play suggested was on the second day after she went missing. J.B. Hatfield was the one who said it. Tully Buford was there, too, and so were old Doc Dunaway and Earl Pierce. Doc is a retired veterinarian, had to give up his profession when his arthritis got too bad; he’s the quiet one of the bunch, likes to play chess with Cody Smith, the town barber, or just sit minding his own business. Earl owns Pierce’s Auto Body, but he spends more time in my place than he does at his own; lazy is the word best describes him, and he’d be the first to admit it. J.B. works for Great Northwest Building Supply. Young fellow, husky, puts on a tough-guy act now and then but not in an offensive way. He’s the only one who wasn’t afraid to stand up to Tully Buford. Two of them were always sniping at each other. One time they went outside in the alley to settle an argument, but no blows were struck. Tully was the one who backed down, not that he’d ever admit it. J.B. got the worst of the face-off, though. It was his goat that was shot a week or so later.

The bar talk that evening was all about Mary Dawes, naturally, and J.B. said, “I wonder if somebody killed her.”

“Now who’d do a crazy thing like that?” I said.

“Her ex-husband, maybe.”

“Wasn’t a bitter divorce. What reason would he have?”

“Hell, I don’t know. But it sure is funny, her disappearing so sudden and her car still out there at the auto court.”

Earl said, “Could be she went with a man one time too many.”

“Picked the wrong one, you mean?” I said. “A stranger?”

“Somebody passing through and stopped in at the Blue Moon for a meal. Lot of crazies running around out there these days.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” J.B. said, and looked straight at Tully.

Tully didn’t catch the look. He said to Doc, “Hey, Doc, you think Mary’s been killed?”

“I have no opinion.”

“You never have no opinion about nothing. Come on, now, you old fart. If she was killed, who you suppose done it?”

“There’s no point in speculating.”

“I asked you a question,” Tully said, harsh. “I want an answer.”

Doc sighed and looked him square in the eye. He’s mild-mannered, Doc is; usually he just ignored Tully. But Tully picked on him more than most and even a quiet old gent can get fed up. “All right, then,” he said. “If she was murdered, the person responsible might be living right here in Ridgedale. Could even be the same coward who runs down stray dogs and shoots defenseless animals in the middle of the night.”

It got quiet in there. Tully’s face turned a slow, turkey-wattle red. He said, “You accusing me, Doc?”

“Did you hear me say your name?”

“You better not be accusing me. I told you before, I never run down that mutt on purpose. You go around accusing me of that and worse, you’ll be damn sorry.”

“What’ll you do?” Doc asked. “Throw a rock through one of my windows? Pour sugar in my gas tank? Shoot some more cats in my neighborhood?”

Tully shouted, “I never done none of those things!” and grabbed Doc’s shoulder and squeezed hard enough to make him yell.

“Leave him alone.” That was J.B. He stood up and pulled Tully’s hand off Doc’s shoulder. “Doc’s got bad arthritis — you know that, you damn fool.”

“Who you calling a damn fool?”

“You, you damn fool.”

Tully was up, too, by then and the two of them stood nose to nose, glaring. I said, “Take it outside, you want to fight,” but it didn’t come to blows between them this time, either. The glaring contest went on for about a minute. Then Tully said, “Ah, the hell with it, the hell with all of you,” and went storming out.

Earl said as J.B. sat down again, “I was you, J.B., I’d lock up that new goat of yours and keep a sharp eye on your property from now on.”

It was the next day, Saturday, the manager of the old auto court opened up Mary’s cabin and found the bloodstains.

More than a few, the way we heard it, on the bed and on the bathroom floor. Long dried, so they must’ve been made the night she disappeared. The place was torn up some, too, from some kind of struggle. The county sheriff came out to investigate and didn’t find anything to tell what had happened, but he considered the cabin a crime scene and kept right on investigating.

News of the bloodstains really stirred things up. It looked like murder, all right, and we’d never had a mystery killing in Ridgedale — no killing of any kind since one of the DiLucca sisters shot her unfaithful husband thirty-five years ago. Nobody who came into my place that night talked about anything else. Tully Buford wasn’t among them, though; he never showed up.

“Blood all over the place,” J.B. said. “Told you she’d been killed, didn’t I?”

“Well, we still don’t know it for sure,” I said. “They haven’t found her yet.”

“Might never find her. Plenty of places to hide a body in all the wilderness around here.”

“Won’t make any difference if they do or don’t,” Earl said. “Whoever done it’s long gone by now.”

“Not the way I see it, he isn’t.”

“You think it’s somebody lives here, J.B.?”

“I think it’s Tully.”

“Come on, now,” I said. “What Doc said last night, he didn’t mean it literally. Did you, Doc?”

He shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“I don’t know. Tully’s a bully and a bunch of other things, but a murderer?”

“Shot my goat, didn’t he?” J.B. said. “Run over that stray dog on purpose, didn’t he?”

“Big difference between animals and a woman.”

“Mary might’ve turned him down once too often. Tully’s got a hell of a temper when he’s riled and drunk.”

“I sure hope you’re wrong.”

“I hope I’m not,” J.B. said.

Well, he wasn’t. And we found it out a lot sooner than any of us expected.

Sunday morning, the sheriff arrested Tully Buford for the murder of Mary Dawes.

Cody Smith came into the tavern, all hot and bothered, and told us about it. He got the news from his brother-in-law, who works as a dispatcher in the county sheriff’s office, and he couldn’t wait to spread it around.

“Sheriff found Mary’s dress and underclothes and purse in a box in under Tully’s front porch. Soaked in blood, the lot.”

I said, “The hell he did!”

“There was a bloody knife in there, too. Tully’s knife and no mistake — his initials cut right into the handle.”

“Told you!” J.B. said. “Didn’t I tell you he did it?”

“How’d the sheriff come to find the evidence?” I asked. “What set him after Tully?”

“Phone call this morning,” Cody said. “Man said he was driving past the auto court three nights ago, late, and saw Tully putting something big and heavy wrapped in a blanket in the back of his pickup. Decided he ought to report it when he heard about the bloodstains in Mary’s cabin.”

“Anonymous call?”

“Well, sure. Some folks, you know, they don’t want to get themselves involved directly in a thing like this.”

“But the sheriff took the call seriously?”

“Sure he did. Figured at first it might be some crank, but then he got to thinking about the trouble he’d had with Tully and Tully’s reputation and he decided he’d better have a talk with Tully. Got himself a search warrant before he went, and a good thing he did. Soon as he found the box and saw what was in it, he handcuffed Tully and hauled him off to jail.”

“Tully admit that he done it?” Earl asked.

“No. Swore up and down he never went near Mary’s cabin the night she disappeared, never saw the box or the bloody clothes.”

“What about his knife?”

“Claimed somebody stole it out of his truck a couple of weeks ago.”

“He’ll never confess,” J.B. said. “He never owned up to anything he done in his entire miserable life.”

Doc said mildly, “A man’s innocent until proven guilty.”

“You standing up for Tully now, Doc?”

“No. Just stating a fact.”

“Well, I don’t see much doubt. He’s guilty as sin.”

“They haven’t found Mary yet, have they?”

“Not yet,” Cody said, “but a team of deputies has already started hunting on Tully’s property. If they don’t find her or what’s left of her there, sheriff’s gonna organize a search with cadaver dogs.”

Well, they didn’t find Mary on Tully’s property and the search teams and cadaver dogs didn’t find any trace of her in the surrounding countryside. They were out combing the hills and woods five days before they gave up. Sheriff’s men did find one other piece of evidence against Tully, though. More bloodstains, small ones in the back of his pickup. All the blood was the same — type AB negative, Mary’s type and not too common. They knew that on account of she’d given blood once during a drive at the county seat.

Meanwhile, Tully stayed locked in a cell hollering long and loud about how somebody was trying to frame him. According to Cody’s brother-in-law, he threw out the names of just about everyone he knew, J.B. Hatfield’s number one among them. But it was just a lot of noise that didn’t get listened to. Nobody liked Tully worth a damn, but who’d hate him enough to frame him for murder?

None of us went up to the county jail to see him. None of us would have even if he hadn’t been throwing accusations around, trying to lay the blame on somebody else. Plain fact was, life in Ridgedale was a lot more pleasant without Tully Buford around.

There was a lot of speculation about whether or not the county district attorney would prosecute him for first-degree murder. “Bet you he won’t,” Earl said. “Not without a whatyoucallit, corpus delicti.” Doc Dunaway pointed out that corpus delicti meant “body of the crime,” not an actual dead body, and that precedents had been established for first-degree homicide convictions in no-body cases. Even so, the D.A. was a politician first and a prosecutor second, and he didn’t want to lose what in our small county was a high-profile trial. Most of us figured he’d play it safe. Try Tully on a lesser crime, like manslaughter. Like as not there was enough circumstantial evidence for him to get a conviction on that charge.

Turned out that’s just what he did. The trial lasted about a week, with a parade of witnesses testifying against Tully’s character and nobody testifying in his favor. The public defender didn’t put up much of a defense, and Tully hurt himself with enough cussing and yelling in the courtroom to get himself restrained and gagged. The jury was out less than an hour before they brought in a guilty verdict. First-degree manslaughter, ten to fifteen years in state prison.

There wasn’t a soul in Ridgedale didn’t believe justice had been served.

Well, that was the end of it as far as I was concerned. Or it was until this morning, nearly a year after the trial ended. Now all of a sudden I’ve got a whole different slant on things.

It was Al Phillips gave it to me. Al is Soderholm Brewery’s delivery-man on the route that includes Ridgedale; he stops in once a month to pick up empty kegs and drop off full ones. I went out to talk to him and lend a hand, as I usually do, and while we were unloading the fresh kegs he said, “I was up in the state capital last weekend. Took my wife to the outdoor jazz festival up there.”

“How was it?” I asked.

“Oh, fine. But a funny thing happened afterward.”

“What sort of funny thing?”

“Well, believe it or not, I think I saw Mary Dawes.”

My first reaction was to laugh. “You must be kidding.”

“No, sir,” he said seriously. “Not a bit.”

“Must’ve been some woman looks like Mary.”

“Could be, but then she’d just about have to be her twin,” Al said. “I stopped in at the Blue Moon for lunch enough times to know Mary Dawes when I see her.”

“Al, she’s been dead a year. You know that.”

“All I know is what I saw last Sunday.”

“You talk to this woman?”

“I tried to, but she hustled off into the crowd before I could.”

“Did she see you?”

“I don’t know. Might have.”

“If she did, why would she avoid you like that?”

Al shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Mary,” I said. “Mary Dawes.”

“Yes, sir. Mary Dawes.”

I didn’t believe it then. I’m not positive I do even now. But after Al left I couldn’t get rid of the notion that Mary might still be alive. I was still chewing on it when Doc Dunaway came in. It was early afternoon then and there weren’t any other customers. I drew him a pint of lager, his only tipple, and when I set the glass down in front of him, he said, “You’ve got a funny look, Luke. Something the matter?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said, and I told him what Al had told me.

He drank some of his beer. “It couldn’t have been Mary,” he said. “A woman who looks like her, that’s all.”

“That’s what I said. But Al sure sounded convinced. If he’s right, then Tully’s innocent like he claimed and somebody really did frame him — for a murder that never happened.”

“Then how do you explain Mary’s sudden disappearance? Where did the blood in her room come from, the blood on her clothes and Tully’s knife and in the bed of Tully’s pickup?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that. Suppose it was all part of a plan. Suppose whoever wanted to frame Tully paid her to disappear the way she did. Paid her enough so she wouldn’t mind having herself cut and spilling some of her blood.”

“Sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”

“Not if whoever it was hated Tully enough.”

“You don’t mean J.B?”

“Well, he’s the first one I thought of,” I said. “Only J.B. doesn’t have much money and it would’ve taken plenty to convince Mary. And he’s not too smart, J.B. isn’t. I just can’t see him coming up with a plan like that.”

“Who else could it be?”

“Somebody with both brains and money. Somebody who was sick and tired of Tully and his bullying and carousing and killing of defenseless animals—”

I stopped. Of a sudden, the back of my scalp started to crawl.

Doc? Doc Dunaway?

No, it couldn’t be. But then I thought, yes it could. He was a vet for forty years and he loved animals and he was smart as a whip and he had a nice fat nest egg put away from the sale of his veterinary practice. Old and arthritic, sure, but a man didn’t have to be young and hale to steal a knife out of an unlocked truck or help mess up a cabin and sprinkle some blood around or hide a box under a porch or make an anonymous telephone call. And a vet would know exactly how and where to make a surgical cut on a person’s body that would bleed a lot without doing any real damage...

Doc sat watching me through his spectacles. His eyes have always been soft and kind of watery; now they seemed to have a hard shine on them, like polished agates.

Pretty soon he said in his quiet way, “Won’t do to go around speculating, Luke. That’s how ugly rumors get started and folks get hurt.”

“Sure,” I said, and my voice sounded funny. “Sure, that’s right.”

“Chances are it wasn’t Mary Al Phillips saw. And even if it was, why, she might not be in the capital for long. Might decide to leave the state entirely this time, move back East somewhere.”

“Why would she do that?”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say your theory is correct. The person who conceived the plan might have kept in touch with her, mightn’t he? Might offer her more money now to move away so far she’ll never be seen again by anyone from this county. Then there’d be no proof she’s alive. No proof at all.”

I didn’t say anything. My throat felt dry.

“Know what I’d do if I was you, Luke?”

“...What’s that?”

“I wouldn’t mention what Al Phillips told you to anybody else. I’d just forget about it. Tully Buford belongs where he’s at, behind bars. Ridgedale is better off without him.” Doc finished his beer, laid some money on the bartop, and eased himself off the stool in his slow, arthritic way. Then he said, “Well, Luke? Are you going to take my advice?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“Better think on it long and hard before you do anything,” he said, and shuffled out.

Think on it long and hard? I haven’t done anything yet. And I still can’t make up my mind.

I’m a law-abiding citizen; I always try to do the right thing, always want to see justice done. It’s just not right for an innocent man to be sitting in prison for a crime that never happened in the first place — even a man like Tully Buford. My duty is to go to the sheriff and tell him what I suspect.

But what can he do? Nothing, that’s what. Not without proof that Mary’s alive and Tully was framed, and I don’t have a shred to give him. Just a lot of unsubstantiated maybes and what-ifs.

And I could be mistaken about Doc Dunaway. I don’t think I am, not after the conversation we had, but I could be. There wouldn’t be any justice in smearing his good name without evidence, would there? I sure wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Besides I’ve always liked Doc; he minds his own business, never bothers anybody, just wants to be left alone to live out the rest of his days in peace.

And there’s no denying he was right about Tully. Tully might not be guilty of murder, but he’s guilty of plenty of other crimes and he belongs in prison. You wouldn’t get an argument about that from anybody in Ridgedale.

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

What would you do?